1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to access of data in general, and, in more particular, a system for accessing data using voice commands via a voice communications connection to a remote database access system.
2. Background Information
Today's work environment is more mobile than ever before. The proliferation of cellular telephony, wireless Internet-enables devices, laptop computers, handheld PCs and various other technologies have helped create a traveling “virtual office” work environment for many. Many professionals spend endless hours on the road, in airports, at business meetings, etc. Prior to the existence of the foregoing devices, the traveling professional might have to bring paper copies of his or her work with them if he or she needed access to such information while away from the office. Today, such information can be easily accessed via a laptop computer or handheld computer.
Although these modern devices are wonderful, there are often situations when a business professional is away from the office, and needs to obtain data that is difficult, if not impossible, to access using current technology. For example, much of today's business data is stored in central repositories, such as enterprise databases. While accessing enterprise data is relatively painless via a land-line network link, the problem gets more difficult when a land-line network link is not available, such as is often the case for the mobile professional.
On first glance, a wireless network link might appear to be a viable option; however, current wireless network access is generally very slow and unpredictable. For instance, wireless Internet access of full-featured Internet sites typically provides data transfer rates of only 20 kbits/sec. Why not access the data via an Internet-enabled phone? While many wireless phone and PDA manufacturers tout their devices' ability to access the Internet, what they don't advertise is that these devices can access only a very limited subset of Internet sites, including virtual private network hosts, that support the WAP (Wireless application protocol) protocol transport and include special versions of some of their web pages and data coded in WML (wireless markup language) rather than the HTML (hypertext markup language) code used for conventional web data.
It would be advantageous to enable the mobile professional to access data from virtually any location, such as via a wireless phone. This type of data access is presently provided by many banking institutions and credit-card agencies, whereby customers are able to access their personal banking and credit-card information by navigating through sets of fixed menu options by providing “voice” commands in response to predetermined system prompts. However, this type of voice access to data is very limited, as it only allows access to a very limited set of institution-generated data, and the mechanism for accessing the data is very static. For instance, under most voice-enabled bank data access systems, an individual may only access their own account data through a predetermined fixed navigation path. Ideally, it would be advantageous to enable users to access a wide variety of different data types from a telephone, whereby the user could perform ad hoc queries and access user- or company-specific information that has been stored in a database by the user or others known to the user rather than an institution that maintains the database.